"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." So said – depending on your source – Frank Zappa, Elvis Costello or critic Lester Bangs.

What he – whoever he was – probably meant is that one art can't be expressed in terms of another. Yet people try. Musicians, especially, have often tried to express the visual through the medium of tone.

"Pictures at an Exhibition" by Mussorgsky, "Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee" by Gunther Schuller and "Romare Bearden Revealed" by Branford Marsalis all try, in their different ways, to translate brush strokes and ink lines into

"This is the largest and most ambitious project I've done on a professional and commercial level, for sure," says Reid, who played with Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Nancy Wilson, Art Farmer and Dexter Gordon, among others, and was for many years the director of jazz studies at William Paterson University. The CD release party for the new work is Wednesday at the Jazz Standard.

This five-movement suite (the selections have names like "Glory," "Singing Head" and "Tapestry in the Sky") is a nod to the sculptures and prints of Elizabeth Catlett, whose pieces inspired by African-American life and culture have been exhibited worldwide.

Her statues of Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson are part of the civic art of New Orleans; her Ralph Ellison ("Invisible Man") memorial can be seen in West Harlem. Her work is part of the collections of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Prague and the Institute of Fine Arts in Mexico. Yet Reid had only a nodding acquaintance with her when he was commissioned in 2006 to write his suite.

"I had a coffee table book about her in my house for almost 20 years, without realizing how heavy [the art] was," he says. "Then all of a sudden, it jumped out at me. Then I began to research more of who she was."

The "Quiet Pride" project represents a double-dare for Reid: to the challenge of translating visual art into sound, add the challenge of composing and arranging original music for a large orchestra – more than 20 pieces. Though known first as a performer, Reid, 70, has been honing his compositional skills over the last decade.

"I got involved in the BMI Composers Workshop in the city, and it was an environment that allowed you to develop your own ideas, and watch them develop and watch them grow," he says. "It kind of ignited me. ... Some people seem to be amazed that I'm still evolving and trying to expand my horizons. But there's still so much to do."

Translating visual into audio, as Reid does in his Catlett pieces, has its own kind of logic, he says.

"It's basically looking at art and capturing the mood that it gives you," Reid says. "It could be somber, it could be joyful. One of the pieces is called 'Mother and Child.' In the sculpture, it's abstract, but it's very clear, you see these flowing lines that kind of mold into one another. So that could depict, musically, two different lines coming together and intersecting and paralleling."

How well did he do? Catlett herself (she died in 2012) was pleased, Reid reports.

"I got a chance to meet her," he says. "She's been in my home, we've been in her home. She was really pleased [with the music]. She said she never had anybody write something of such magnitude inspired by her art."